Diwan: A Wind: grypomachy

"2:55:43 PM Fenhl: did joyce use created languages in finnegans wake or did he just use various natlangs?
2:55:49 PM Dedalvs: Joyce did use Esperanto roots."

--Chat Log for LCC4 Day 1

(pic by Sheryl St Germain on Fb)

Night Gallery.

"Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness." --Adam Roberts

Feeling irresistibly drawn to crumbling buildings and abandoned places.

Fumes of Formation.

Do cu vanci le ba panje xusra

You are the evening of the future-spongy-asserter day.

My Lojban bumper sticker had faded to near indecipherability, but luckily i was able to order another from England. Now it is the only thing new on my dusty old Alero. Even if you know Lojban, it makes little sense. Where did it come from?

In the age of Google, few mysteries remain. There was a time when LOBYPRE were eagerly (some more than others, myself among the former) assembling one of those immaterial monuments, an English-language Wiki, about Lojban.

It was all interlinked (tunnelled, antlike–spongily), & somewhere between an educational channel & a nerd playground. So someone had programmed a computer to randomly generate (mostly-) grammatical utterances, & another program could turn any Lojban text into music (or rather, notes). Thus was born that curious Wiki entry, “Lojban Rock”. And the most famous line of that (one that appeared elsewhere in Lojban culture, as a kind of esoteric in-joke), was the line—immediately & perdurably mistranslated—about the evening of the “porous prophet”.

Even so, without Lulu, it probably would not have become a bumper sticker. Still, rather than a tshirt or coffee mug (or mousepad—there’s an artifact of a certain era), i chose to have that slogan printed to baffle the world from the rear of my car.

In the place i live, i really don’t want to invite trouble with something expressly liberal. On the other hand, if i were to encounter another LOBYPRE, I’d be embarrassed to speak. (Which has happened. Likewise my Esperanto, when in Prague.) It’s just not the way i’m accustomed to dealing with the language.

It is all too easy to say: learning a language means using it. And, it is true, for a short while i’d gleaned about sixty words of relatively speakable Czech. But I now know my true language talent is more like that of a bricoleur, or a maker of crossword puzzles. Is this a subset of poetry, or something else altogether?

Arimaspoi. Aristeas. "...even if a travel to Central Asiatic regions was not impossible in archaic times, this travel is only an unnecessary hypothesis for explaining Aristeas’ Arimaspea."

(via)

"Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died.

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.

Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.

Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well-educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson,Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished."

--Vince Vance, on Fb

2006 Shelley discovery (only just noticed by me). "In Europe too wild ruin rushes fast..."